Tu Holmes is the Rx Muscle Member of the Month for February 2016!

[Curt James]

Tu Holmes is the Rx Muscle Member of the Month for February 2016!

Tu Holmes has been a member of the Rx Muscle Forums since the very beginning, February 2009! Nearing 3,000 posts, Tu's posting strategy exemplifies quality over quantity. Sr. Infrastructure Engineer, Voltron fan, and music lover, let's learn more about Tu Holmes!



How did you learn about Rx Muscle Forums?

I think I was like most of the early crew that came over from MD around the first day or two.

I think you, SallyAnne, GirlyMuscle, ~gymdiva~, Tatyana, and a few others were in the first wave. I'm sure I wasn't as early as others, but we all came over around the same timeframe if I recall... You know... The dust up with Blechman and all of that.



What are your favorite parts of Rx Muscle Forums?

I take RX a little more seriously than other boards I'm a member of... mostly because I consider the old guard as friends. Maybe not always the most friendly of friends, but friends nonetheless.

I also love RX in the contest coverage. They really have been the best at it.

I think what Dave and the gang do in regards to Audio Visual is definitely the future of content delivery of some sort. Whether it's YouTube or something like an "app" like a Hulu or whatever... That's actually a good thought.

How hard is it to get involved in Hulu? That could be an interesting revenue stream. I had a conversation with someone else recently about how to get more of this stuff in front of a world wide audience.

That was just one venue.

Who are some members you’d like to see return to the forums?

I would love for SallyAnne to come back. She was always fun. I know she doesn't work here anymore, but that doesn't mean I don't miss her being around. Tatyana got a beau and has never been heard from again. She had some funny stories. Anyone Remember Ortski? If I thought more, I know I could come up with a few, but really, it's understandable that people drift apart.

Members come and go, but they will all come back when they have some free time I'm sure. A good experience brings people.

What would you do to improve the site and the forums in particular?

This is a good question. I think as people we always see issues, but we don't know how to actually resolve them.

One thing I would think could be helpful is get more of the Species (Does that also make the RX?) sponsored athletes to be more active on the boards. I don't know exactly to what extent, but there certainly has to be something else right?

I mean, it's about community.

The more people who are on the board, the more we will have people we know be involved in it. It's really up to us as a group.

How were you introduced to the weights?

My story is probably completely cliche.

I was seriously the super skinny kid when I was really young. Didn't really even like to eat.

When I was 10, I busted my face wide open. The right side of my jaw was split from my lip going back towards my ear. You could see my teeth from the outside. I couldn't eat solid food for about 6 weeks. Chicken Broth and crap through a straw the entire time.

Once I could eat again, I started eating everything in site. By the time I was 12, I was putting on a few extra pounds so I realized I had to get active. I started playing baseball and stuff.

Around this time, Arnold was becoming a huge megastar. Every kid my age looked at him and said, THAT guy is what I want to be built by.

The Jr. High I went to had a decent weight area. It was kept in the gym / auditorium up in the back of the stage. After getting into a little dust up with a kid I had a class with, the wrestling coach put me under a bench and I guess that was it.



Even after I transferred counties and switched schools, I kept trying to push up something.

Even though I'm kind of on the fluffy side these days, eventually, I always get back under something heavier to start moving it.

What is your favorite part of the iron game – strongman, bodybuilding, Men’s Physique, Bikini, etc.?

In the 90s I loved Bodybuilding. Absolutely loved it. The lines, the symmetry. Couldn't get enough.

These days I love strongman. Those guys are absolutely amazing to watch. The weight the move... hurts me to even think of it.

I think fitness is just fantastic. They do real work on stage. That's not just a beauty contest for them. They actually have to show they are "fit". How many pro bodybuilders would you say are actually "Fit?

Oh, I'm a huge fan of women's physique too. This is what female bodybuilding should be in my mind.

Now, don't get me wrong, I know that women who compete in Female Bodybuilding are hard workers and I mean no disrespect when I say it. I think muscle is good on a woman. There does come a point where the amount is a distraction. Women's Bodybuilding at the pro level has reached that distraction point.



It's not the women's fault either. The judges kept placing larger and more muscular women in the center and kept giving them the wins. The top group in the IFBB created the environment where bigger was better, then got upset when they found out that the fans don't agree.

That's an entirely different subject though.

What's your favorite thing about bodybuilding?

That's an easy question. The moving of the weights part is the best. Moving the human body while listening to some killer tunes. There is possibly nothing easier to do unless it's sit on my butt and watch TV.

What's your least favorite thing about bodybuilding?

Diets, man... diets suck. It's why I've never been on a stage. I can never hold a diet together long enough to get lean enough to step up on the stage and have striated glutes.

No way. Not gonna happen.

PS Cardio is shit, too.

What's your favorite cheat meal or favorite food?

This is where it gets really tough. I'm into food. Big Time.

Sushi. Pizza. A great double-cheeseburger. Man... all awesome.

However, I gotta say, if I had anyplace to go? It's either going to be Mongolian Bar-B-Cue or this Asian place called "Shophouse".

If you ever have a chance to go to Shophouse, go. Don't ask why... just do it.

A close second is the Mon-Gril Mongolian. They are both chains, so hopefully you have one close by.

What is your goal so far as the weights go?

I have no goals. At this point, it's just stay healthy. Maybe lose a few pounds. Enjoy my life and live a good one.

[Curt James]

Do you have any favorite bodybuilders or strength athletes?

As I get older I hate everyone, however, way back when, I used to love Flex Wheeler, Kevin Levrone, Rich Gaspari, Lee Priest (Pre-tats), and obviously Arnold.



Women wise, I think Cory Everson and Kim Chizevsky were great.



Today? Whew!

I don't know if I know any "new" Pros.

I mean, I think Dexter is great, but he's been around forever. I could put him up with the group up top.

I had a meeting with Milos Sarcev once with a couple of other guys and man, you want to talk about someone who is a nice guy. He really is. Dude sat with a total of three of us and just talked bodybuilding for hours.

Strength wise I will always love The Kaz. Guy is a Legend, but I used to watch all of the WSM stuff when Derek Poundstone, Mariusz Pudzianowski, and Phil Pfister were around.

What are three things you couldn't live without?

Food. Water. Oxygen.

Oh... You mean I'm supposed to actually say something NOT necessary for human life.

Shoot dude. I dunno. I mean. Stuff is just "stuff". None of it really matters to me. I'm more about experiences.

I like to do things, not necessarily "have things".

Except cocaine. I fuckin' love cocaine. (I'm kidding!!!! Or am I?)



I’m a romantic. How did you meet your girlfriend? :-)

Ok... I'm going to type all of this out, so you guys will have to bear with me. It's a kind of long story.

The simple version is "We met Online". Now, it's not like it is today either. There was no Plenty of Fish or Tindr.

The long version:

We met on the boards. We were just acquaintances.

I was married. I had 2 kids. I was just doing my thing. She was just a person on the boards that was around. This is probably 2006? No big deal. Just another person online.

I get divorced and move across the country, but I end up travelling a lot.
Eventually I guess we chatted more. Nothing consistent, just a message here or there. I remember her working a lot... I mean a lot. So I always said, you know, I'm not that far away sometimes when I'm travelling, so how about we go hang out... Get you away from work. I never thought anything more than us being friends. I was messing around with more than one female at the time and getting into a solid "relationship" was not even a remote thought for me.

She always tells me "No." which was fine. I would just do my thing and maybe another 4 months or so would go by and I might say, "Hey, You wanna go grab dinner or whatever?"

She would keep saying "No" and that was it. I wasn't really thinking anything of it aside from being a good friend.

2012 rolls around and I am traveling for work. I ask her if she wants to go do something when I'm around and for some reason, she says, "Yes."

We go hang out.

Now, at this point I just see it as two people who have known each other for a long time just being friends.

She apparently saw it is a "date". Mars and Venus they say.

We saw each other like a month later a couple of times. Skipped a month, then the month after.

Now, by this point, one of the women I was messing with REALLY and I mean REALLY pissed me off with some disrespectful stuff and that REALLY made me rethink a couple of things.

One of things started thinking about was how this woman was not disrespectful at all. She was such a sweet girl. Loved animals. Just all around a good person.
This made me start to rethink a couple of things and so I decided I would actually invite her out on what I considered a "date".



We went out.

A couple of weeks later, I asked her to fly across country to my office Christmas party.

She came and that was the very first time we even kissed (5 months after what she considered our first date... talk about going slow right?)

We moved in together a month later and that was it. It sounds quick, but really, after the time it took us to even get to that point, it's going to work or it won't. Been stuck with each other ever since.

We've had some struggles, no doubt, but it's been 3 years now, so I think it's going to stick.

How old are you? I mean, were you brought up in the computer age? I’m from the world of the abacus.

I’m 40. Still feel like 20.

Holy cow! Your LinkedIn page looks like you created computers. I can barely turn one on. When did you get your start or become interested in computers and could you destroy me with a keystroke? O.o

Haha… No… I couldn’t destroy you. Not physically.

Could I do some damage to your life if I really wanted to? I’ll plead the fifth.

Now, to tell on myself, some of the things I used to do when I was a teenager have become felonies now. Back then, when you did some of the things, the technology was so new that people didn’t even know how to handle these things. They weren’t crimes. Surely they were “frowned upon”, but that was it.

I remember doing something technologically when I was 16, I did end up getting caught by the High School Principal because there was a slightly different paper trail and my mom was always paying attention.

Suffice it to say, I was so busted, but he had no idea what to do with me. I ended up sitting in his office for about 30 minutes, he was amazed at what I had done and just told me to go back to class.

As far as my start goes… I think I was about 6.

Six? As in six-years-old?

For Christmas, my mother bought me my first personal computer. It was a Commodore VIC-20. For people who don’t know, the VIC-20 was a small 8-bit computer that just ran BASIC and plugged into a TV.



I used to have my mom take me to Radio Shack where I would buy the books of programs and send hours and hours writing programs from the book and saving them to an external tape drive to save them.

I did that for years and years.

I still keep a lot of my old computers and nerd stuff too. I found my first 286 PC in one of my moms old offices along with my old Gameboy.

Shockingly, in High School I never even took computer classes. There was a very cool computer teacher there and he didn’t care that I wasn’t in any of his classes. He used to let me come in there and program crap anytime and just mess around.

He told my mom he wished he had hundreds of kids like me in his classes, but I wasn’t even IN his class. I would just come by during lunch and after school when it wasn’t during one of my sport seasons and just program and tear down and rebuild PCs.

I saw your post on Facebook with the cover of A Guide to Programming Turbo Pascal.

That turbo pascal book… I have no idea how old mind you. Possibly from 1990.

What does a Sr. Infrastructure Engineer do during a regular shift? Or does regular shift not apply?

Regular shift doesn’t exist in my life. I might get up around 8 and start taking calls or I may not have to do anything early. Eventually I get into the office a little before 10am or so and leave around 8 at night. Sometimes a bit earlier. Sometimes a bit later.

I do a lot of things. Probably 12 hours a day most of the time. I handle networking, hardware, virtualization, and build pipeline for a video game studio.

This means I do what IT engineers and Application Developers do on a regular basis.

There’s a lot to it. One minute I might be fixing a code problem, the next, I may be designing network upgrades.

Let’s talk about giant robots. Who wins in a fight, Gort or a (pick your favorite) Jaeger?

Voltron, Lion, not car, not triple robot, would crush all others.



There is an ongoing argument I have with a couple of friends because they say Voltron is second to Mickey Mouse.

I think they are fools.

2016 goals?

Goals? We don’t need no stinkin’ goals.

I have been such a slacker in the gym this year that I guess if I have a goal it’s to actually put my butt back in there 4 or 5 days a week again and just stay healthy.
Of course when it comes to my career, there is always a goal. I always want to achieve more and do more.

I’m just wired that way.

“Some people can be very judgmental... Not me of course, but some people.”
With that quote in mind, any group in mind in particular? I’m thinking of religious people when I think of judgmental. Well, that and Planet Fitness. Because, yeah, they say no judgment zone, but wtf?

“Me judging what someone else does with their life would just be hypocritical.”
Is there a story there?

I laugh that you use the words “A story”. My life is that story. You would have to have followed me around from 2008-2012.

I am divorced and to keep it PG, let’s just say that the years immediately following my divorce I was doing ALL kinds of shit. Most of them involved strippers and porn chicks.

I have some stories… Tons. I don’t want them all over the internet though, so I’ll keep them for face to face discussions.

My woman knows most of them. I don’t keep anything from her.

A wise man.

Brothers, sisters, mom and dad? How goes the nuclear family?

Mom, brother, sister. Dad passed away a few years back. I don’t really talk about them too much, but they are all good people.

Iron Maiden! What music do you enjoy? What bands or singers would you recommend? What’s on your iPod right now?

That’s right! Iron Maiden! (Bill and Ted doing air guitar)

I really love all kinds of music. Metal, Rap, older Pop, and even what the kids all “Trap Music”. Trap music is basically Rap stripper / ho music today.

Some of the older bands I’ve always loved are, Candlemass, Guns N’ Roses (Like everyone else), Judas Priest, and of COURSE, Iron Maiden.

Today’s bands? Man… I love Lacuna Coil, Crashdiet, Family Force 5, and Steel Panther.



I mean if I was to look at my iPod, you’d see Zebra, Whitesnake, Will.I.Am, Timbaland, The Rosebuds, Prince, Poison, Ozzy, OutKast, Motley Crue, Metallica, Megadeth, Jane’s Addiction, Enya, Enigma, Bond, Michael Jackson, Deadmau5, and literally hundreds of other bands and artists.

I think I have about 25 Gigabytes of just MP3s alone.

Do you have a favorite film?

I don’t really think I have a “favorite” film to be honest.

Honestly, before I moved to Los Angeles, I almost never went to the movies, but there’s something about the movie industry being embedded into so much here that I seem to have caught the bug.

I remember the first time I went to Mann’s Chinese in Hollywood.

During the previews, you had people screaming for trailers that looked awesome and booing trailers that looked stupid.

I had never seen anything like that before. It was truly an experience.

After that, I started hitting up the other theaters around area.

The El Capitan is the theater that’s actually owned by Disney, and they have a huge organ player and usually do something fun before all of their shows. It’s always a fun experience.

There’s the Arclight in Hollywood with the dome.

They all have something a little different about them.

WoW? What games are you playing or do you have time for games and comics? If so, any favorites?

I no longer play World of Warcraft. That game sucked up so many hours of my life. It’s a great game mind you. The size and epic scale of everything is absolutely fantastic, but it’s a time waste like no other. I avoid it now.

I actually play only a few games at a time on a platform, but I have so many platforms.

On PC right now:

From Blizzard: Heroes of the Storm and StarCraft II.

EA: Titanfall and Battlefield 4

On PS4:

Star Wars Battlefront and Lego Batman 3. I also play any sports games on PS4.

I don’t have an Xbox One anymore. I traded it in for a Nintendo 3DS XL.

I love that thing. I play so much on that because I travel a bit and I use it a lot on planes.

There’s an RPG on the 3DS called Stella Glow that I’m deep into right now.



Thank you for sharing part of your story, Tu. And thank you for contributing to the Rx Muscle Forums. I'm glad you're here and look forward to more of your posts!

[PTB]

Congrats Holmes!!

[Curt James]

Congrans

I'm dead.

[cook]

Congrats T.U.....you got anymore pictures of gymdiva?

[BananaHammock]

Congrans

I'm dead.

Lol

[BananaHammock]

Where are his sexy pics?

[Curt James]

Where are his sexy pics?

I kept them all for myself.

muahah

[Mac]

Congratulations Tu! Another geek... not that it's a bad thing since my close friends say that about me. )

[Tu Holmes]

Where are his sexy pics?

I kept them all for myself.

muahah

I'm actually shocked that Curt didn't toss one or two out.

Here's a good douchebag pic of myself.

TuTheDouche.jpg

Here's one with me after scrubbing down at the gym.

TuAtGym.jpg

And here is me and some bitches.


TuAndBitches.jpg

[Curt James]

This thing is going to hit 20K views in no time!

[Tu Holmes]

Definitely not.

I need better tits.

[~gymdiva~]

[Hit-Girl]

Nice, congrats!

[KnightXavi]

Congrats, Tu!! Good job.